


let life so transform me

by nerddowell



Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Greek Mythology, Artist Steve Rogers, Brooklyn Era, Dry Humping, First Kiss, First Time, Frottage, Greek Mythology - Freeform, I don't know where this AU came from, Love at First Sight, M/M, Pre-Captain America: The First Avenger, Pygmalion, Sculptor Steve Rogers, Statue Bucky Barnes, a little bit of porn, am I ever going to stop writing AUs nobody asked for?, but I'm glad it's here, probably not, sorry grandma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-10
Updated: 2018-05-10
Packaged: 2019-05-05 00:04:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14604702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nerddowell/pseuds/nerddowell
Summary: Again Pygmalion kissed him; and he felt his breast; the ivory seemed to soften at the touch, and its firm texture yielded to his hand, as honey-wax of Mount Hymettus turns to many shapes when handled in the sun, and surely softens from each gentle touch.- Ovid,Metamorphoses10.vii





	let life so transform me

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, I have no excuses other than that I'm a complete nerd who studied Classics & Archaeology at uni and I've already written [the archaeology AU](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4566357) so obviously this had to follow.
> 
> Title from Yes' _Turn of the Century_.

There was no sound in the room except the slurring of pencils over Michelet paper, the squeak of charcoal, the occasional whispered request for an eraser or a stick of chalk between neighbours that was quickly hushed by the master. Nobody was allowed to talk in the life class; maybe to discourage the sort of coarse comments nudity could provoke among young men (because the life classes were always segregated by sex).

Steve, sitting in the back row as far away from the stove as possible, coughed as discreetly as he could manage into his handkerchief. He was still struggling to fight off the bronchitis that had laid him low all winter, and the fumes were irritating his lungs. The professor’s sharp eyes turned towards him, and he suppressed another cough, making his back spasm painfully.

They’d been drawing for nearly an hour, and the class had another hour to go before close. Next to Steve, a boy with a smudge of charcoal on the bridge of his nose leaned around the side of his easel to get another look at the model, eyes steady and assessing as he sketched on his pad. Steve snuck a glance across at the boy’s work, and his stomach dropped. He was good, and worse, he managed to make an average-looking model – mid-30s, slightly lank hair, scarred from docks work and with a twisted back that would have been the reason for his remaining in America despite the war on in Europe – look beautiful. There was movement in the limbs, a soft glow on the skin of the man’s chest, a quirk to his lips that spoke of humour hidden. A lie, but a beautiful one, Steve thought, and looked back at his own paper.

His work was a jumble of small details, lips and hands and shifting planes of a broad back, disjointed and disconnected from the whole. He wasn’t a prude, he wasn’t ashamed to take home a sketchbook full of nudes, but there was something that told him he shouldn’t. Perhaps it was the way his head could turn for a handsome man just as easily as a beautiful dame, or perhaps it was the thought that once he started looking, he wouldn’t be able to stop. The times weren’t kind to men like that, after all. Every boy in Brooklyn knew where to avoid on the docks late at night, the way that ‘swish’ was spat at men who looked a little too feminine or acted a little less interested in chasing skirts.

Men like Steve, small and delicate with long eyelashes and the kind of red, plump mouth men referred to as ‘cock-suckin’ lips’ on a girl. He had enough problems with getting into fights without making his life any more difficult.

Not that Steve _was_ one of those guys. Or one of the guys who’d whale on them. He kept himself to himself, for the most part, but if he saw it, he couldn’t and sure as hell _wouldn’t_ let it slide. He’d square himself up, puffing his chest out as much as his scoliosis and asthma would let him, and he’d get as many punches in as he could. He was usually the one to end up with the black eye or the split lip, true, but he was the shield between the weak of Brooklyn and the ones who’d try to crush them down.

His ma, God rest her soul, had always despaired of him, telling him constantly that that smart mouth of his’d get him into trouble one day, but that was the way she’d raised him to be – standing up for those who couldn’t for themselves.

He turned his attention back to his drawing, starting a study of the model’s hair where it dripped in lazy waves over his brow, trying to focus on the play of the light over the strands. His chest was aching, threatening another racking spasm of coughing, and he fought it down. It was bad enough that his sickness had cost him yet another job over the colder months, bad enough that this was the first time he’d been able to scrape together the price of the class in weeks; he wasn’t about to make the professor throw him out for disturbing the classroom peace and quiet.

It was no good. Steve doubled over, coughing hard and long enough to see stars, until his throat was raw and his chest felt as though it’d been hollowed out with sandpaper. He excused himself as soon as he could stand, collecting his things and hoping that his face expressed his regret well enough that he wouldn’t have to speak and make it all worse as he left the room.

He forewent the trolley on the way home, choosing instead to walk, taking in the sights and sounds (as much as his poor eyesight and unilateral deafness would allow) of Brooklyn. Dusk was falling, the streets beginning to empty. The docks below his apartment window were full of the laughing of workers finishing their shifts for the day, streaks of curses from those just arriving, and the clanging of machinery as cargoes were loaded and unloaded. Steve curled his body up on the sill, fetching his class supplies out of his ragged satchel, and started to sketch, the skeleton of the Brooklyn bridge appearing on the page with a few strokes of his pencil.

There were a knot of dock workers standing just on the other side of the fence between his apartment block and the dock, lounging against a truck and sharing dirty jokes. Steve’s attention soon drifted away from the scenery towards them, far enough below him that he could look for as long as he liked without fear of getting caught. One of them, grubby with dirt and the sweat of a long day of physical work, had stripped to just his vest and jeans, arms crossed lightly over his chest as he shook loose hair out of his face and laughed at something one of the others said.

Steve’s pencil began to trace the line of the guy’s jaw, the scruff on his cheeks, the curve of his lips, as he got lost to dreaming, giving his hand free rein over the paper. Steve was thinking about the last class he’d managed to attend at the college, drawing from sculpture, mind’s eye filled with the voluptuous, curving lines of the marble; the curls artfully distressed where they lay on the stone brow and the sweeping planes of the figure’s chest. He sketched and thought about a sculptor’s hands chiselling that beautiful body out of the block of stone, the words of Michelangelo: _I saw the angel in the marble, and carved until I set him free_.

He set his pencil aside and looked down at his sketchbook, his eyes widening.

The face drawn there was the most beautiful Steve had ever seen, too beautiful to be anything or anyone real. Wide, long-lashed eyes – Steve could practically already see the precise shade of blue, somewhere between silver in moonlight and the sky on a bright day – and a sweet, straight nose with the slightest turn up, full lips that begged to be kissed and bitten. Not that Steve knew how to kiss at all, really. He’d managed the odd peck from a girl who felt sorry for him, but nothing to write home about, or even to mention, really.

The body belonging to that face was well-built, all thick thighs and a strong back where it curved forwards, resting its chin on one knee with muscled arms slung around its shin, hugging itself. Drawn with fine, smooth lines that belied the shaking in Steve’s hands as he took it all in.

The other striking thing about the drawing was that it was unmistakably _masculine_. The face was soft, but with a hidden steel underneath; and, further down, well… Steve had left the join of those long, strong legs deliberately murky, only the roughest of lines and the barest hint of a sex, but it was more than enough, and it gave him a giddy lurching feeling in his heart to think about.

Steve imagined the razor-sharp jawline set, the knitting of the figure’s brows as he focused on some task, the fierce light in his eyes. His stomach knotted, his heart fluttered; Steve groaned. The very last thing he needed was to become fixated on some figment of his imagination, but here he was, staring at a goddamned drawing and wondering what it would be like to see that face on a living, breathing man.

Just as well that would never happen.  
  


* * *

  
When the college advertised a sculpture class a couple of weeks later, Steve signed up right away, despite the astronomical cost of the supplies and materials. Sure, they’d start out with clay, something relatively cheap and fairly malleable, but he’d be cutting at least one meal a day to be able to afford even the first class. Paper, thankfully, was cheap. Sculpture, not so much.

He couldn’t get the man he’d drawn out of his mind. Those lips spoke to him at night in a warm, amused Brooklyn drawl, teasing and promising. In his dreams, he’d be held in strong arms, all but crushed against a broad chest with five o’clock stubble scratching lightly at his shoulder and hair not his own falling into his face. Sometimes there’d be more, a hand playfully slipping down over his thin chest, towards his groin, and he’d wake from those dreams gasping and with sticky shorts. He’d had more cold showers in the past few weeks than he had in the rest of his life, including when he’d been as horny a teenage boy as anyone else his age.

It didn’t let up during the day, either. Steve would go out in the morning and notice a stranger’s hair the exact shade of deep chocolate-brown, another with the same swaggering gait and heavy footfall.

Every week, he’d take a little more clay home with him, secreted away in an old jam jar with enough slip to keep it wet and malleable. When he got back to his apartment, he’d set the clay down and work with it for hours, squeezing and shaping, dipping his fingers into a bowl of water whenever the material got too dry and threatened to crack from overuse until he had a rough outline of a face, a hand, tiny details that would make the whole.

The week they moved onto stone in class, his entire chest hurt with anticipation (and, if he was being honest, nerves). This was the time he’d been waiting for. The professor had announced that after a few weeks of practise on small blocks, they’d be allowed free rein over a block to create a piece that the college could use in a gallery showing of sorts to advertise their art department. The thought of any of Steve’s art out for people to look at made him shrink uncomfortably. He’d always drawn only for himself, in truth, and had only taken the classes in order to improve his technical abilities. But now he had the opportunity to bring the thing that had been keeping him awake at night and driving him to distraction during the day to life, and he couldn’t bear the thought of anyone else seeing it. Seeing him.

Steve could share anything but him.

The first week, he practised transferring a hand – one of the details of the first of the life class models he’d sketched – into stone, roughing out the soapstone with a point chisel. It took until nearly the end of the class to achieve even the basic form of the hand, still needing the finer points of musculature and the careful forming of the fingers. Steve drew out these points with his charcoal, giving himself guidelines to follow, and by the end of the class had managed to create something that, if not perfect, at least looked like a hand, if a little rough around the edges.

He was panting, flushed and sweaty as he left the classroom, arms and back aching from the constant swing of the mallet and strike of the chisel into the rock, but he savoured every moment of it, knowing it was bringing him closer to freeing _his_ angel from the rock.

In the fifth week of the sculpture class, the professor announced that they would be allocated their materials for their show pieces. He raised an eyebrow when Steve told him he needed a block tall and wide enough for a full-size life model sculpture; shook his head, began to say that it was impossible, and then saw the steel in Steve’s eyes. Steve was given the soapstone he needed, and from then on, he worked on it until his body couldn’t allow him to do so any longer.

For weeks, he chipped at the stone piece by tiny piece, shaving off no more than a flake at a time, until the figure of a young man – or at least, a very rough outline of one – appeared. Every day he would arrive at the studio the moment the college opened, and he would stay until the very last second he was allowed, frequently forgetting to eat until a kind student or one of the arts professors brought him a cup of coffee and reminded him to fuel himself up. He worked for hours every day until the studio was covered in fine stone dust, and then he would cover the statue with a tarp and help the janitors to get the place looking presentable again until he could come in and ruin it all once more tomorrow.

It was incredibly slow going, not least because the work exhausted him almost to the point of collapse; he brought out his calipers every other minute, measuring the most minute fractions of the surface to ensure that he placed every chisel strike perfectly. After four months, he had a figure with recognisably human features. After six, he had a boy sitting, one leg bent under his chin and the other with the top of its ankle pressed to the former’s heel, arms hugging the bent knee and the pose languid but speaking of a lazy strength. He worked and worked until every last inch of the statue was as smooth as real skin, until the dreamy, faraway eyes seemed to gaze intelligently into the room as he watched them, until he could almost feel every individual strand of the young man’s gently curled hair.

Once the statue was finished, Steve felt almost bereft. Although he’d finished – and with better results than he could ever have dreamed – there was nothing more to work on, and he’d become so used to visiting the statue every day to shape and sculpt and smooth away any imperfections that he no longer knew what to do with his free hours. He managed to pick up another job – long hours, filing in a back office with only one tiny window that barely let any breeze in, not ideal for the height of summer – but once his days at the office were over, he would walk back to the college and sit in the studio with his sculpture, and talk.

Strangely, it didn’t seem weird to talk to something inanimate. The boy was carved from stone, true, but Steve had poured so much effort and care into the process that he could almost believe that the statue breathed whenever he looked away. Steve took to calling it Bucky, after a boy on the street his mother had grown up on, who’d died of the bulbar polio when she was nine.

The date of the gallery showing loomed ever closer, and Steve still couldn’t bring himself to allow the professor to have even a preliminary viewing, let alone put Bucky on show for the whole world to gaze at. He sat at Bucky’s feet, staring up at the immobile soapstone face, and shared every thought in his head, every fear he had, about what the world at large would say, would do when Bucky was revealed to them. What if some private art collector wanted to buy him? Steve would have to say yes – God knew he needed the money, even with his new job, and the professor would push hard for it – but he knew he wouldn’t be able to let Bucky go.  
  


* * *

  
The night before the showing was due to open to the public, Steve visited the gallery and Bucky one last time. After tonight, Bucky would no longer belong just to Steve, and so it was a goodbye of sorts, one that made Steve’s stomach twist and a fist clench around his heart until he couldn’t breathe. Bucky sat on his plinth, gazing away into space, as Steve approached and rested his hand on one cool thigh. He smoothed his thumb over the stone, staring at Bucky’s face, and sighed heavily. For a moment, he would swear that there was a little give in the stone underneath his thumb, a pillowing as though he’d squeezed real flesh, but he chalked it up to finally having gone mad and ignored it.

He must really have gone mad, because the next thing he did was stand on his tiptoes – even with Bucky seated, it was a stretch because of the height of the plinth he was resting on – and brush his lips across those of the statue, resting his hand on the back of Bucky’s head and wishing he could tangle it in his loose curls properly. He’d been taunted with them in his dreams for so long, the tiny quirk of Bucky’s lips into that shy but knowing smile.

The marble was warm under his mouth, warmer than he was expecting, and soft, bordering on pliant. He leaned back for a moment, surprised, before pressing their lips together again, harder this time. Taking what he’d wanted for so long.

This time the marble was definitely warm, and the lips opened beneath his, parting around a gentle sigh that made him startle and jump back with wide eyes.

Bucky was no longer stone, no longer cold and white as though frozen in time. Instead there was a light flush of blood beneath skin, and a definite rise and fall to his chest. He flexed long, clever fingers – fingers Steve had spent weeks carving, stroking with emery to remove burrs and leave gleaming smooth stone beneath – and blinked slowly, like someone awaking from a long sleep. The white of the soapstone was replaced by blue, with the exact flecks of green and silver Steve had been imagining for so long, and his perfect stone hair had been replaced with ruffled chocolate-chestnut locks that now hung in his eyes.

Steve reached up as if on autopilot to brush them away, and Bucky’s face turned towards his hand, pressing a warm cheek into his palm with a soft noise of contentment. His limbs unfolded themselves and he stepped down from the plinth, stopping in front of Steve in all of his glory.

And Steve meant _all_ of his glory, because Bucky was as naked as night.

He flushed a bright red, and Bucky’s mouth curved into a smile, a real smile that showed perfect white teeth – one at the front a little crooked – and Steve felt himself go weak at the knees. He opened and closed his mouth uselessly, a thousand things to say warring with one another in his head and too tongue-tied to voice any of them, and Bucky reached for him with one broad hand, wrapping it around the back of Steve’s neck to draw him into another kiss.

His mouth was hot and insistent against Steve’s, tongue licking at the seam of Steve’s lips, and Steve opened obediently around a breathless moan that made Bucky huff a laugh into his mouth. The hand on the back of his neck squeezed gently, and the other made its way to the small of Steve’s back, pulling their bodies flush together and pressing a half-hard and quickly filling cock to Steve’s stomach.

That made Steve whimper, and Bucky laughed again.

His voice made Steve’s head spin, husky and heated as he whispered, ‘Been waitin’ a long time for you, Stevie,’ in his ear, chasing the words with gentle nips of his teeth and tiny sucking kisses up the line of Steve’s throat until all he could do was helplessly let his head loll back, trembling under Bucky’s ministrations. How someone who had until mere minutes ago been stone, with no knowledge of the world and even less (presumably) of sex, could unravel Steve so quickly and expertly, as though he’d done it a thousand times before, Steve would never know, but he certainly wasn’t complaining.

They kept going, seconds of contact bleeding into minutes, and each meeting of their lips grew rougher until Bucky was grazing his teeth against Steve’s bottom lip and Steve was clinging to him for fear that if he let go, he’d collapse entirely. Bucky held him tight and close against him, and began sinking to his knees, taking Steve with him until they were sitting, and then lying down, Steve on his back with Bucky between his legs, rocking his hips against Steve’s.

Steve would be terrified, but the rock-hard weight of Bucky’s cock – naked to the night air in the gallery – against his had sent every thought but _fuck_ and _it’s **good**_ and **_more_** out of his head, and Bucky was groaning against him, strong arms pinning Steve down and rutting against him until fireworks were exploding under Steve’s skin and he was crying out into the kiss, shorts rapidly becoming wet and warm with the streams of come filling them.

Bucky moaned, his face twisted up in pleasure, and jerked his hips twice more against Steve’s in rapid, aborted movements before he shuddered and came, stripes of come splattering over the front of Steve’s trousers and his shirt. Steve couldn’t do anything more than lay under him, breathing hard, starstruck at the pure pleasure on Bucky’s face, the heat and warmth of him under Steve’s hands, and the pressure of the desperate kiss Bucky laid on him as he rode out the aftershocks.

He collapsed down next to Steve when he was done, panting, and they stayed there for long minutes until Steve ventured to speak.

‘Did I imagine that or was it real?’

Bucky smirked, catlike, and grabbed Steve’s hand, wrapping it around his cock and smearing come over the length of it.

‘Feels real enough to me, Steve.’

‘Yeah,’ Steve mumbled, awed, and Bucky laughed.

‘Let’s go home. And by home, I mean you’re gonna take me back to wherever you’re stayin’, and I’m not gonna let you out of the bedroom just about ever.’

Steve was going to be lucky to survive the journey without spontaneously combusting if Bucky kept that up, but he’d take that chance.

**Author's Note:**

> I made this a graphic. It's [here](http://translorastyrell.tumblr.com/post/173769918807/stucky-au-1-greek-myths-pygmalion).
> 
> And my tumblr, so you can yell at me to stop writing this shit, is [here](http://translorastyrell.tumblr.com/msg).


End file.
